Tim,
Thanks for the very interesting and suggestive data.
At the risk of crossing threads, I wonder if this citation pattern is
peculiar to physics or, even more narrowly, to arXiv? As arXiv grows to
encompass more/all of physics, the volume of submissions should make the
"inbox of research" approach unfeasible. I can't see this ever being
possible in the biomedical field - not even now.
In contemporary medicine, the watchword is "evidence" - practice should
follow the best evidence, seen as a collection of research testimonials to
the validity of a particular course of action, or of controlled clinical
trials, rather than a single "high impact" paper. This evidence may go back
in time some way (there has been much trawling through the back-catalogue
for HIV/AIDS case reports, for example, as a number of these pre-date the
definition of HIV/AIDS and offer clues to the genesis of the syndrome). The
reading and citation results in the field are thus likely to be strongly
influenced by this pattern of research and reading.
It would be interesting to see empirical data such as you have gathered for
arXiv/physics from other fields.
Chris
Chris Zielinski
Director, Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network
Currently External Relations Officer, HTP/WHO
Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland
Tel: 004122-7914435 Mobile: 0044797-10-45354
e-mail: zielinskic_at_who.int and informania_at_supanet.com
web site:
http://www.iwsp.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Brody" <tdb01r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review
> Chris Zielinski asks:
>
> > how many articles have been read but not cited?
>
> The folloowing estimates are from Citebase's database
> (http://citebase.eprints.org/) -
>
> (but duly noting caveats on data-quality, scope, coverage, noisiness,
> potential for abuse etc, http://citebase.eprints.org/help/coverage.php
> http://citebase.eprints.org/help/#impactwarning )
>
> Looking at the 91,017 arXiv.org articles that have a "journal reference"
> (the author has said where the article was/will be published)
>
> 17628 (19.4%) have not been cited but have at least once been downloaded
> from uk.arXiv.org
>
> (of the remainder 73265 have both been cited and downloaded, 98 have been
> cited but not downloaded, and 26 were neither cited or downloaded)
>
> I believe this is because physicists read all the new additions to the
> arXiv.org, as it forms a convenient "inbox" of research. However, over
time
> downloads are more discerning between low impact and high impact (pink
line
> is the top quartile of papers by citation impact):
> http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/hitslatencybyquartile.png
>
> Correlation r between "hits" and citation impact for the top quartile is
> 0.3359 with an n of 25,532.
>
> Citations and downloads are mutually re-inforcing. If an author has read
an
> article they are more likely to cite it, conversely if an author sees a
> citation they are likely to read the article that has been cited.
>
> All the best,
> Tim.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <informania_at_SUPANET.COM>
> To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 7:39 AM
>
> > In fact, Stevan mentions "other new online scientometric measures such
as
> > online usage ["hits"], time-series analyses, co-citation analyses and
> > full-text-based semantic co-analyses, all placed in a weighted multiple
> > regression equation instead of just a univariate correlation". Indeed,
> > impact factors are very crude quasi-scientometric and subjective
measures
> > compared even with such simple information (easy to obtain for online
media)
> > as counts of usage - for example, how many articles have been read but
not
> > cited?
> >
> > All these are indeed worth pursuing and, I would have thought, right on
the
> > agenda of the OA movement.
> >
> > Chris Zielinski
> > Director, Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network
> > Currently External Relations Officer, HTP/WHO
> > Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland
> > Tel: 004122-7914435 Mobile: 0044797-10-45354
> > e-mail: zielinskic_at_who.int and informania_at_supanet.com
> > web site: http://www.iwsp.org
Received on Wed Nov 27 2002 - 09:06:49 GMT
